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9/11GET LAMP: Scott Adams Interview
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- Publication date
- 2007-01-21
- Usage
- Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
- Topics
- GET LAMP, Scott Adams, Adventure International, Text Adventures
- Language
- English
- Item Size
- 7.4G
Scott Adams is considered one of the giants of adventure games, especially text-based adventures (The Scott Adams Grand Adventures (SAGA) series is especially cited). He is the founder of Adventure International, which sold software for a variety of platforms, mostly involving entertainment. This company grew wildly through the early 1980s but eventually went bankrupt in the inevitable industry shake-out, but should be considered one of the top "old-school" microcomputer software companies. His adventures were of the two-word parser variety, with sweeping general themes: the pirate adventure, the mystery game, the jungle.
From Scott Adams' own website: "Scott was the first person to put an Adventure game (also known as Interactive Fiction) on a personal computer. This was in 1978 and the computer was a 16k Radio Shack TRS-80 model I. Scott went on to write over a dozen different adventure games for the personal computers of the 1980s. He is credited with starting the entire multi billion dollar a year computer game industry. Many people have written Scott and explained how his early games help led them into a career in computers today. Scott is 50 years old now and living in Wisconsin. He is married and has 5 children."
Scott divorced Alexis, his wife and co-creator of some of the adventures, a good number of years ago, and has since remarried with a large family. Alexis continued to live in Florida until her passing in April of 2008.
This interview was nearly missed because it had been snowing rather fiercely and my rental car slid out of control multiple times getting to the hotel - Scott graciously drove into town where I was and picked me up, taking me out to his farm to conduct the interview. A huge thanks to him for his generosity in sitting for this taping, and contributing so much to the final work.
Mr. Adams has said in several contexts that he finds text adventures boring in the modern world, and spends a lot of his "gaming time" online with games like Everquest, Baldur's Gate, and so on.
From Scott Adams' own website: "Scott was the first person to put an Adventure game (also known as Interactive Fiction) on a personal computer. This was in 1978 and the computer was a 16k Radio Shack TRS-80 model I. Scott went on to write over a dozen different adventure games for the personal computers of the 1980s. He is credited with starting the entire multi billion dollar a year computer game industry. Many people have written Scott and explained how his early games help led them into a career in computers today. Scott is 50 years old now and living in Wisconsin. He is married and has 5 children."
Scott divorced Alexis, his wife and co-creator of some of the adventures, a good number of years ago, and has since remarried with a large family. Alexis continued to live in Florida until her passing in April of 2008.
This interview was nearly missed because it had been snowing rather fiercely and my rental car slid out of control multiple times getting to the hotel - Scott graciously drove into town where I was and picked me up, taking me out to his farm to conduct the interview. A huge thanks to him for his generosity in sitting for this taping, and contributing so much to the final work.
Mr. Adams has said in several contexts that he finds text adventures boring in the modern world, and spends a lot of his "gaming time" online with games like Everquest, Baldur's Gate, and so on.
Shotlist
Single shot of Scott Adams sitting at his desk.
